Australia news LIVE: Large-scale ransomware data breach engulfs Australian health provider; Slovak PM in life-threatening condition after assassination attempt

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has urged people not to speculate on the company involved in the ransomware data breach.

The minister wrote on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, that she was briefed on the incident in recent days and the government convened a National Coordination mechanism today.

“Updates will be provided in due course. Speculation at this stage risks undermining significant work underway to support the company’s response,” she wrote.

O’Neil said the Australian Cyber Security Coordinate Michelle McGuinness is leading the work to support the company to manage the incident.

Federal police are now investigating the breach, after the Australian health businesses was targeted.

Earlier, McGuinness said she was working with agencies to coordinate a response to the incident.

Turning to NSW, where nurses have refused to rule out widespread industrial action over their demand for a 15 per cent bay boost from the state government.

The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association’s list of demands for an improved pay deal, finalised last week, include a 15 per cent pay rise across the board, a new 30 per cent penalty rate for night shifts, and boosting sick leave to 20 days.

Appearing at a press conference alongside Health Minister Ryan Park this morning, general secretary Shaye Candish said the union would work constructively with the government but was serious about boosting pay to match those on offer in other states.

“We certainly will not rule any action out,” she said.

“Our members are incredibly serious.”

The state government handed paramedics a 25 per cent pay boost last year after about a third of the workforce threatened to withhold renewal of their professional registration, avoiding a shutdown of triple zero when those registrations expired on New Year’s Day.

Park said he wanted to avoid a similar stand-off with nurses.

“I’m a little person, so my ability to manage all-in brawls has always been a bit of a challenge,” he said.

“Look, I hope that we are able to work through this issue in a really proactive but productive way.”

The government has begun recruiting the first of 2480 full-time nurses as part of a key union push for “safe staffing levels”, which designate one-on-one patient care in emergency department resuscitation beds and minimum staffing levels on other wards.

The Senate has overwhelmingly passed a motion condemning the controversial “river to the sea” chant and decrying antisemitism after Labor sided with the Opposition.

While not naming her directly, the motion introduced by Opposition Senate Leader Simon Birmingham came in response to comments the previous day by Labor Senator Fatima Payman in which she used the slogan.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese previously condemned the phrase as provocative, and Jewish groups say it is a call for the destruction of Israel.

Payman did not participate in the vote, which was supported by all the Labor senators present in the chamber.

The motion passed 56 votes to 12, with only Greens senators and independent senator Lydia Thorpe voting against it.

The motion said that the “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chant “opposes Israel’s right to exist, and is frequently used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”.

It also said that the Senate “welcomes Prime Minister Albanese agreeing with comments from former Defence Department Secretary Dennis Richardson calling the slogan ‘a very violent statement’ which could ‘easily flow into actions of violence against communities in our own country’.”

Federal police are investigating after an Australian health business was targeted in a large-scale ransomware data breach.

Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant-General Michelle McGuinness said an unnamed “commercial health information organisation” was the victim of the breach.

“I am working with agencies across the Australian government, states and territories to co-ordinate a whole-of-government response to this incident,” she said.

“TheAustralian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre is aware of the incident and theAustralian Federal Police is investigating.

“We are in the very preliminary stages of our response and there is limited detail to share at this stage, but I will continue to provide updates as we progress while working closely with the affected commercial organisation to address the impacts caused by the incident.”

Follow the updates here.

Opposition Senate Leader Simon Birmingham is introducing a motion condemning the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and decrying a rise of antisemitism in Australia.

While not mentioning Labor senator Fatima Payman by name after her comments yesterday, Birmingham said it was unfortunate some members of the government had used the chant.

As Birmingham spoke, Independent senator Lidia Thorpe shouted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “What about the genocide in Palestine?”

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong is responding now.

Payman is not currently in the Senate

NSW Premier Chris Minns has slammed one of his own MPs for a “reprehensible” speech in which he labelled Police Commissioner Karen Webb a “liar” over the behaviour of officers at pro-Palestinian protests.

On Tuesday night, Anthony D’Adam, an upper house Labor MP and parliamentary secretary who has been an outspoken advocate for Palestine, gave a speech criticising the conduct of police at a rally in Sydney in March in which three people were arrested.

D’Adam used a late night speech in parliament to criticise the conduct of officers, and in particular Webb’s previous defence of police conduct at the protests. D’Adam also labelled the war in Gaza a “genocide”.

“The approach of the public order and riot squad at many Palestine protests makes a liar of the commissioner,” he said.

“It used fear and intimidation as a means of obtaining compliance. We will not be intimidated, especially when we are trying to stop a genocide.”

D’Adam and Minns have repeatedly clashed since Labor came to government over the former’s comments over Palestine.

He has been an outspoken critic both of Israel, and of the federal government’s position on the conflict and has previously said Israeli Prime Mnister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for killing “thousands of innocent children”.

The premier has described D’Adam as “deliberately inflammatory” but has avoided sacking him from his position as a parliamentary secretary because he believes that is what the MP wants. But responding to the comments on Wednesday, Minns labelled his comments about Webb “reprehensible”.

“Being a NSW Police officer in the most difficult circumstances imaginable, particularly right now, is far harder than issuing a speech in the middle of the night [in Parliament],” Minns said.

“I thought his comments were absolutely reprehensible. I completely disassociate myself from them and I want to make this point; we don’t want to make a martyr of anyone in this set of circumstances and I thought that the comments from the member were completely outrageous.”

The full bench of the Federal Court has unanimously found Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has no legal requirement to assess the impacts of climate change when approving new coal and gas mines.

However, in joint findings, Chief Justice Debra Mortimer and Justice Craig Colvin found the case underscored the limits of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act in assessing environmental harms.

“Notwithstanding our conclusions on the grounds of appeal, the arguments on this appeal do underscore the ill-suitedness of the present legislative scheme of the EPBC Act to the assessment of environmental threats such as climate change and global warming and their impacts on MNES [matters of national environmental signficance] in Australia.”

“This proceeding, and the merits decision-making underlying it, might be said to raise the question whether the legislative scheme is fit for purpose in this respect.”

A legal challenge brought on behalf of 26-year-old Ashleigh Wyles, originally from the Queensland town of Mackay, had sought to force Plibersek to reconsider the approval of 19 coal and gas mines, including the Narrabri and Mount Pleasant coal mine expansions.

The case, led by the Environment Council of Central Queensland and represented in court by Environmental Justice Australia, challenged Plibersek’s refusal to scrutinise new coal and gas projects on the basis of their climate harm.

Narrabri Coal Operations (a subsidiary of Whitehaven Coal) and MACH Energy, joined Plibersek in defending the proceedings.

In October, Federal Court Judge Justice Shaun McElwaine dismissed the climate challenge, and the Environment Council of Central Queensland appealed the judgment.

But in a brief hearing in the Federal Court of Australia on Thursday, Justice Craig Colvin – on behalf of the full bench – dismissed the appeal.

He ordered the parties to try to reach agreement on costs by May 30 and, if they could not, to file submissions on costs by June 13.

Outside court, Wyles pronounced herself devastated, while her partner Merinda Bathe struggled to hold back tears.

“We fear this will open the floodgates for the Minister to now approve dozens of new coal and gas projects on her desk,” Wyles said.

“As the Environment Minister, her one job is to protect our environment. But instead of standing up to fossil fuel companies we saw her stand alongside them in court and defend her refusal to act on the climate harm of new coal and gas.”

Asked whether she would consider further appeals to the judgment, Wyles said the team would now consider its options.

The nation’s jobless rate jumped to 4.1 per cent in April, raising doubts whether the Reserve Bank will push ahead with future interest rate increases.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning reported the unemployment rate lifted by 0.2 percentage points last month. The jobless rate was 4.1 per cent in January, but this was attributed to many people taking time away from work before re-entering the jobs market.

Unemployment was at 3.7 per cent in February.

Financial markets had been expecting an increase of about 0.1 percentage point.

There was a 38,500 increase in the number of people holding down a job, but a 30,000 lift in the number of people looking for work.

The bureau’s head of labour statistics, Bjorn Jarvis, said the participation rate – those in work or looking for it – increased to 66.7 per cent during the month.

“The 30,000 people increase in unemployment reflected more people without jobs available and looking for work, and also more people than usual indicating that they had a job that they were waiting to start in,” he said.

The jobless rate in both Victoria and NSW lifted by 0.2 percentage points, to 4.2 per cent and 4 per cent respectively.

Unemployment remains lowest in the ACT, at 3.8 per cent, despite a 0.9 percentage point jump. The lowest jobless rate among the states is in Western Australia at 3.9 per cent after it increased by half a percentage point.

This week’s federal budget forecast unemployment to be at 4 per cent by the middle of the year while the Reserve Bank has forecast it to edge up to 4.2 per cent.

There’s no quick fix for high rents as the dynamics in the housing market that are keeping prices high are taking time to unwind, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s chief economist says.

Sarah Hunter, who is also an assistant governor at the nation’s central bank, said lethargic home building at a time when fewer people are living together and the population is growing faster, was keeping upward pressure on rents and home prices.

Hunter said new supply would still take time to materialise “given the current level of new dwelling approvals and the information from liaison that many projects are still not viable”.

In her speech, Hunter said the reopening of borders after the pandemic had driven a rebound in net overseas migration and strong population growth.

“A growing population clearly implies that underlying demand for housing is rising over time – all of these extra people need a place to live,” she said.

Yet the number of people living in each dwelling was also trending lower, which Hunter said was making “no small difference” to the demand for housing.

While the average number of people living in each household shifted from about 2.8 in the mid-1980s to about 2.5 of late – a seemingly small change – a return to the trends of the ’80s, for whatever reason, would mean 1.2 million fewer homes would be needed, she said.

Meanwhile, Australia will get an update on the state of the labour market today when April jobs numbers are released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

AAP

Teal MPs, including Zali Steggall and Zoe Daniel, have taken to social media to call out the government for pushing its fuel efficiency standards bill through the House of Representatives without debate.

The government has moved to vote on the bill’s third reading before there has been debate – a vote that the government will win as it has a majority in the lower house.

Steggall, the Warringah MP, posted to X that, while she supports the bill, “process is essential to good laws and democracy”.

Similarly, Daniel, the Goldstein MP, wrote on X that the move represented “a complete abuse of process”.